Executioner Wasp

''Polistes carnifex'', commonly known as the executioner wasp or executioner paper wasp, is a neotropical vespid wasp in the cosmopolitan genus ''Polistes''.

It is a very large yellow and brown paper wasp with a mandible that contains teeth. It establishes small colonies, founded by solitary queens, which build nests under the eaves of buildings or suspended from branches. Foraging adults bring nectar and macerated prey back to the nest to feed to the developing larvae which are individually housed in separate cells in the nest.

Vernacular names

As its range includes only small portions of the English-speaking Americas, ''P. carnifex'' has only recently taken on an English vernacular name, but in the mid-2010s the name executioner wasp was proposed, a calque upon the Latin specific name ''carnifex'' "executioner, hangman".

In Paraguay, it is usually known in Guaraní as ''kava mainomby'' "hummingbird wasp", in reference to its great size; less commonly, it is called ''kava alazán'' "brown wasp" (more usually used for '' P. cavapyta''), or ''kava sa'yju'' "yellow wasp" (more usually used for ''Agelaia multipicta'' or '' A. pallipes''). In the Mexican state of Guerrero, speakers of Malinaltepec refer to the executioner wasp and the closely related '' P. instabilis'' as ''a'ma xtíya cháda'' " huarache-nest wasp", alluding to the flattened shape of the nests that they build.

Taxonomy

In 1768 HMS Endeavour left Plymouth on the first voyage of James Cook, reaching the harbour of Rio de Janeiro a few months later, in November. Here one of the passengers, the wealthy naturalist Joseph Banks, procured a female specimen of giant wasp, which made its way around the world to eventually arrive in England in 1771.

Meanwhile, the Dane Johan Christian Fabricius had travelled to Uppsala University in 1762 to study under the celebrated Carolus Linnæus, and upon returning to Denmark two years later began to work on his first publication, the ''Systema Entomologiæ'', in which he attempted to list all known species of insects (which included spiders, crabs and other arthropods at the time) according to the new Linnaean system. By 1770 he had been appointed professor at the University of Copenhagen, and when in 1773 the University of Kiel (now German) had been ceded to Denmark, he was soon appointed professor there. By 1771 Fabricius began making yearly summer trips to London to study the collections that Banks and others had made in foreign lands, where he was able to study Banks' Brazilian specimen of wasp at Banks' London residence. In 1775 the 832 pages of the ''Systema Entomologiæ'' were finally published, and in this ''Polistes carnifex'' was scientifically described for the first time under the name ''Vespa carnifex'', using Banks' specimen as holotype. This specimen is now stored at the Natural History Museum, London.

In 1802 Pierre André Latreille created the genus ''Polistes'', and in 1804 Fabricius moved this species from ''Vespa'' to the new genus.

The authority citation of the species has erroneously been attributed to Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure, who wrote some of the most important books on the subject of wasps.

In 1853 de Saussure recognised that numerous taxa which had been described by others were synonyms of this species, and synonymised ''P. onerata'', ''P. rufipennis'', ''P. transverso-strigata'' and ''P. valida'' with ''P. carnifex''. He also synonymised ''P. chlorostoma'' and ''P. major'' to it, although both are now recognised as valid species.

Supergeneric classification

The genus ''Polistes'' is the largest genus in the family Vespidae and the only genus in the tribe Polistini.Jackson, Morgan. (2012-10-26)
Taxonomic adventures in the world of paper wasps (''Polistes'', Vespidae)
eb log comment It is classified in the Polistinae, the paper wasps.

Subgeneric classification

Owain Richards in 1973, and again in 1978, classified ''P. carnifex'' in a monotypic subgenus he named ''Onerarius''. In a 1996 morphological study of most of the genus ''Polistes'', James Michael Carpenter found this subgenus to cause the subgenus ''Aphanilopterus'' to be paraphyletic, and therefore synonymised ''Onerarius'' with the subgenus ''Aphanilopterus''. However, by 2018 he no longer followed his own taxonomic interpretation and continued to use Richards' ''Onerarius''.

In 1857 de Saussure was the first to attempt to organise the American ''Polistes'' species, doing so on the basis of the form of the abdomen -either conical, with the first segment broad, and tapering to a compressed last segment, with a conical and somewhat elongated metathorax; or with the abdomen oval-shaped, the first segment ampulliform